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WASHINGTON / Reuters US Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will travel to Jordan, Turkey and Ukraine later this month, the Pentagon said. Mattis will begin his trip in Jordan where he will meet with King Abdullah. Jordan is a member of the US-led coalition fighting IS in Syria and Iraq. The visit will be Mattis’ first to Jordan as defense ...

BEIRUT / Reuters An advisor to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has said the six-year war is nearly over as foreign states cut backing for rebels, and vowed the government would confront any “illegitimate” forces, whether Turkish or American. Bouthaina Shaaban said the fact that Syria was staging the Damascus International Fair for the first time in the war “sends a ...

TUNIS / Reuters Tunisia’s prime minister accepted the resignation of interim finance minister Fadhel Abdelkefi over a conflict of interest in a judicial case, but said he had asked him to stay on until a replacement is found. Abdelkefi is a key member of Prime Minister Youssef Chahed’s government, which is under pressure to carry out contentious economic reforms demanded ...

The most depressing aspect of the current North Korean crisis is that even if Donald Trump wins, he loses. Despite doubling down on his rhetoric of “fire and fury” and deriding his predecessors for failed negotiations, Trump looks like he wants to eventually strike a deal with the nation’s tyrant, Kim Jong Un. Just look at what Secretary of State ...

Looking at the performance of China’s currency this year one would suspect that things are looking up in the local economy. The reality is that the yuan’s 4.5 percent gain against the dollar is as much a reflection of weakness in the US currency as it is about developments in China. At this point, what investors should expect for the ...

We’re having the wrong conversation about women in tech. We need to decouple two very different issues that have arisen amid the commotion about diversity at Google: biological differences between genders, and bias against females working in tech and more generally in well-paid, prestigious jobs. Let’s start with the biology. Studies on how babies or very young children interact with ...

As talks to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement start in Washington, it still isn’t clear whether President Donald Trump wants to dismantle the pact—”the worst trade deal maybe ever signed anywhere,” he’s called it—or merely rebrand the same basic product under his own name. With any luck, it will be the latter. The administration’s negotiating goals, published last ...

aThe trade deficit is a lot smaller than it was a decade ago: Over the 12 months ending in June, according to data released last week by the Commerce Department, the US imported about $531 billion more in goods and services than it exported. In 2006, the deficit was $762 billion. Those numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation; if they were, ...

Largely lost in the debate over how much credit President Donald Trump should or should not get for the performance of US stocks this year is that perhaps the biggest reason for the rally is strong earnings. With more than 90 percent of the S&P 500 members having reported second-quarter results, earnings growth is tracking at a 12.2 percent pace ...

If you’ve never tried a Japanese snack called Jagariko, I highly recommend it. When I visited the Tokyo offices of Japanese snackmaker Calbee Inc., I made sure to ask if I could have a free pack of my favorite snack. “Maybe,” the managers hedged. I wasn’t at Calbee to talk about their potato sticks, but their corporate culture. Calbee is ...